to me about my own companies and the fine dividends we earn by charging high prices to our neighbours." He laughed.
"You remember Sheepskin," he went on, "the old vicar? The Reverend Horace Pendergast has got the job now. He's a cousin of Eleanor's—rattling good preacher. We're hoping to make him a bishop. I went to see the old man once, when I was a youngster, to arrange about my uncle's funeral, and he threw me in a sermon. I don't know why—I wasn't worrying much about religion in those days—but I can still see his round, pink, puzzled face and his little fat hands that trembled as he talked. It was near Christmas time—Christ's birthday; and all that he could think about, he told me, were the Christmas bills and how to meet them. It wasn't his fault. How can a respectable married man be a Christian? 'How can I preach Christ?'—there were tears in his eyes. 'Christ the outcast, the beggar, the servant of the poor, the bearer of the Cross.' That's what he had started out to preach. The people would only have laughed at him. He lives in a big house, they would have said, and keeps four servants and a gig. His sons go to college, and his wife and daughters wear rich garments. 'Struggle enough I find it, Strong'nth'arm,' he confessed to me. 'But I ought not to be
